“Build it, and they will come” must be NVIDIA’s thinking behind their latest consumer-focused GPU: the RTX 2080 Ti, which has been released alongside the RTX 2080. Following on from the Pascal architecture of the 1080 series, the 2080 series is based on a new Turing GPU architecture which features Tensor cores for AI (thereby potentially reducing GPU usage during machine learning workloads) and RT cores for ray tracing (rendering more realistic images). Unfortunately, there aren’t (m)any games that make use of these capabilities so the $1200 price tag on the RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition is difficult to justify. On paper the 2080 Ti has 4352 CUDA cores, a base/boost clock of 1350/1545 MHz, 11GB of GDRR6 memory and a memory bandwidth of 616GB/s. The upshot is that it has around a 30% faster effective speed than the 1080 Ti, which at 18 months old continues to offer comparable value for money and currently dominates the high-end gaming market. Professional users such as game developers or 4K gamers may find value in the 2080 Ti but for typical users (@1080p), prices need to drop substantially before the 2080 Ti has much chance of widespread adoption. [Sep '18GPUPro]

The GTX 1060 is Nvidia’s third 16 nm Pascal based GPU. It follows last month’s release of the higher end GTX 1070 and 1080. The 1060 has a TDP of 120 Watts and its aftermarket variants are available right away alongside the reference Founders edition. Comparing the GTX 1060 and 970 shows that although the 1060 leads by 12% it is also currently more expensive. Nvidia rushed the release of the GTX 1060 to help retain market share that may otherwise have gone to AMD’s new Polaris based RX 480. Comparing the RX 480 and GTX 1060 shows that for pre DX12 games the 1060 edges ahead by 12%. Due to better hardware compatibility, the RX 480 is able to match the 1060 in DX12 games but this will remain a corner case until most games are optimized for DX12 (likely to take several years). The 1060 has the potential to become a hugely successful card, but that all depends on where prices settle. [Jul '16GPUPro]

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